War and State Formation in History

Peter Turchin and colleagues created a computer model to study the rise and fall of states in Europe, Asia and Africa over the period from 1500 BCE to 1500 CE. Their conclusion:

The central premise of the model, which we test, is that costly institutions that enabled large human groups to function without splitting up evolved as a result of intense competition between societies—primarily warfare. Warfare intensity, in turn, depended on the spread of historically attested military technologies (e.g., chariots and cavalry) and on geographic factors (e.g., rugged landscape). . . .  The model-predicted pattern of spread of large-scale societies was very similar to the observed one. Overall, the model explained 65% of variance in the data. An alternative model, omitting the effect of diffusing military technologies, explained only 16% of variance. 

My first reaction to this study is that I could certainly believe that warfare accounts for 65% of the rise of large states in history. Which gives me pause, because this sort of modeling relies very heavily on assumptions. Did they fiddle with the parameters until they got a result that fit their (and my) preconceptions? Can this sort of modeling really tell us anything new, or does it just spit back the data we choose to give it?

The Seven Sleepers and the Shaman's Initiation

The legend of the Seven Sleepers is ancient and well enough known that the leading German version of Groundhog Day is called Seven Sleepers' Day. The story is that around 250 AD seven young Christian men lived in Ephesus, in modern Turkey. When the emperor Decius launched a terrible persecution of Christians, they risked death by refusing to sacrifice to idols. Fleeing the emperor's wrath, they took refuge in a cave in the hills. According to some versions, the emperor had them walled in; according to others they were hidden by their friends. They slept. When they awoke, thinking that only a single night had passed, it was the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius, more than 200 years later. They entered Ephesus, startled to see it full of churches and crosses, and were recognized and honored before they died.

The cave where they are supposed to have slept quickly became a site of Christian worship. A church was built, and the site became a major cemetery with more than 800 burials. Excavation at the site shows that this happened very quickly, before the end of the fifth century. Written accounts survive from the sixth century, and the legend spread rapidly in Greek and Syriac. Some historians think the story of the Seven Sleepers goes back to an actual event of around 450 AD -- perhaps the discovery of well-preserved bodies in a cave, perhaps the appearance of men who claimed to have been sleeping since Decius' persecution. Around 450 AD a great dispute was raging among Christians over the bodily resurrection, and the return to life of Christian sleepers would certainly have played into that debate. The bishop of Ephesus at the time, a certain Stephen, was also very controversial, having deposed and jailed his predecessor and been banned by the Council of Chalcedon, and he might well have made much of such an event to solidify his position.

However it happened, the legend of the Seven Sleepers became entrenched in Christian lore and appears in many texts and works of art. (Above, a window in Rouen Cathdral.) One detail worth nothing is that this sleep appears as gift from God, saving the men from persecution and allowing them to witness for God before the people long after the normal course of their days.

The Seven Sleepers also appear in the Koran, which adds the detail that as they slept they were guarded by a dog. The legend became very widespread in Muslim lands; above is a page from a sixteenth-century Persian omen book, a means of divination.

The story of these "long sleepers" was hardly invented in the sixth century. It draws on an ancient body of myths widespread in Mediterranean culture. There are numerous such stories in Jewish lore, including several that focus on a pious Jew allowed by God's favor to sleep through the whole 70 years of the Babylonian Captivity. Greek versions were common enough that Aristotle cited one in his Physics, part of his argument that time has no meaning without change. Several versions of the long-sleeping story were told of Epimenides of Crete, a shadowy poet and holy man who may have been called to Athens around 600 BCE to purify the city after a great sacrilege. Epimenides was a favorite topic of E.R. Dodds, whose Greeks and the Irrational catalogs Epimenides' ascetic feats, out of body experiences, prophecies, and so on. Our sources call Epimenides theophilestatos, beloved by the Gods.

Why was this story so widespread, and why was long sleep universally considered a blessing from the Gods? Hard to know, of course, but one way to understand the story is to see it as an echo of shamanistic beliefs. What shamans in many cultures did was to fall into a sort of sleep, or trance, in which their souls left their bodies and explored other planes of existence. The lore of shamanism is full of shamans whose power was so great that they could do this for years; even more common are stories of shamans who did this on their first magical journeys, falling into comas of fabulous length before wakening to tell of marvelous things. The dog that guarded the Seven Sleepers' cave seems particularly telling here, since a dog that guarded the land of the dead is an ancient shamanistic motif that ended up in several different mythological systems.

For shamans, their ability to enter the trance state and travel in other lands was a great divine gift, even the greatest gift. Perhaps such stories lingered in the Mediterranean world after most aspects of shamanism had faded out, and when those stories were adapted to new religious ideas the notion that this sleep was a divine gift survived.

Art

All that can be spelled out is without importance.

--Zhou Zuoren, Chinese art critic

Sasquatch Sightings: Can 3,313 People be Wrong?

Yes! Interesting to note that like UFO sightings, Sasquatch sightings have gone down a lot in the age of ubiquitous camera phones. It's just no fun when everyone responds with, "You had your phone, why didn't you shoot a video?" Great map by Joshua Stevens, but it raises the question of why so many sightings in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Drunk Steelers fans?

Footprints in the Sand

I started work today on a new archaeological site on the Patuxent River in southeastern Maryland. One of my rules is that I always explore the area around every site I work on, so I fought my way through the dense tangle of brambles and poison ivy growing on the riprap and down to the little beach along the river. All of the shorelines around here are eroding, some of them very rapidly, so the beach next to any archaeological site is usually strewn with artifacts. But today instead of artifacts I found all of these animal tracks.

 Here are the tracks of four animals.

 The smaller prints belong to an adult raccoon and a smaller mammal, I think a baby raccoon.

Those holes in the sand are deer prints, one adult and one young, no doubt a mother and her infant.

The deer prints led to this little spring in the bank. That water can't be completely fresh, but deer living in these coastal environments have adapted to survive on slightly salty water.

A small shorebird.

And all together.

Flying Sailboats

Wonderful picture by Justin Sullivan of the "boats" in this year's America's Cup, hydrofoiling on the downwind segment of the race. The Americans won two races yesterday, whittling the New Zealanders' lead to 8-5.

Today's Castle: Tirol

Castle Tirol to Austrians, Tirolo to Italians, this ancient fortress is on the border between the German-speaking and Italian-speaking worlds. Even though this is the old center of the Austrian province of Tyrol, it is currently in Italy, but it occurs to me that since major fortresses are often on borders this must often happen to them.

The site has been occupied since pre-Christian times, but the oldest surviving stonework dates to the 11th century. There was a major building episode in the early 1100s, after this became the seat of the powerful Counts of Tyrol.

One of the surviving bits of that early fortress is the Lower Chapel, with its wonderful Romanesque carving.

There was a second major building episode in the 1260s under Count Meinhard II. The Upper Chapel dates to this period.

In 1420 the Count of Tyrol moved elsewhere, and this fortress was largely abandoned. It fell into decay and part was destroyed by a huge landslide. This romantic drawing of 1869 gives an impression of the ruins.

Since then it has been reconstructed, and much of what you see today is not original. I have been trying to find out the status of these much-photographed windows, but without luck. That upper one has a suspiciously well-preserved look for a window.

Still, a magnificent place.

A Stone Statue 10,500 Years Old

From Cyprus, dating to the very beginning of the Neolithic on the island. It was found on the floor of a pit house, apparently put there as part of a cache of other artifacts when the house was abandoned.

More Catalogs of Comets

In writing about the Comet Book a few weeks ago, I mentioned that it was one of a whole class of books devoted to categorizing comets and trying to predict their effects. I just stumbled across the image above, which is from a Chinese document called the Mawangdui silk, found in a tomb at dated to around 170 BCE. Below is a page from Johannes Hevelius' Cometographia, published in 1668. Funny that Europeans thought comets looked like swords, which never occurred to me, or to the Chinese.

Kites

Shot by a friend at Indiana Dunes, Lake Michigan in the background.

Immigration to Mexico

Over the last two years, more Americans have gone to work in Mexico than Mexicans have come to work in the US. That doesn't even include Mexicans who went back home with their jobs in the US evaporated in the recession; add them in, and there has been a major movement south over the border. Right now Mexico's economy is growing faster than ours, and the workers of the world are responding. There are more than a million foreigners working in Mexico now. Many of them have come from Europe; others from Korea, the Caribbean and South America.

Nobody knows how long Mexico's economy will keep this up, and whether it all might be undone by crime and corruption. But with birth rates falling across Latin America and globalization leveling the world playing field, mass flight across the Rio Grande seems a thing of the past.

Too bad they haven't figured this out in the US Congress, where fears of another flood of Hispanic immigrants have led Republicans to block another attempt at a compromise immigration bill.

Happy Equinox

As day and night balance, may you find balance in your life.

A World with Lots of Guns

In Michigan two men who both had concealed carry permits pulled their guns and somehow managed to kill each other.

Police said two men with concealed-carry permits died Wednesday after a shootout allegedly motivated by road rage, the Grand Rapids Press reported. The initial police investigation showed Ionia, Mich. residents James Pullum, 43, and Robert Taylor, 56, pulled into a car wash parking lot after a confrontation on the road. They then exited their vehicles, drew handguns and exchanged fire, authorities said. Police found both men at the scene with gunshot wounds, and the two were pronounced dead at an area hospital soon after, according to the newspaper.

This is the thing about a world with lots of guns in it. There might be less of certain kinds of crime, and sometimes would-be mass shooters might be stopped by a guy with gun. But there will be a lot more killings like this.

The Steampunk Coffee Bar

Truth, a coffee bar in Cape Town, South Africa has gone for the full steampunk look. The design is by Haldane Martin.

Photos by Shanna Jones. I got this from This is Colossal, which is a good site for keeping up with cool art if you're into that sort of thing.

Lego Art?

New book of Lego art, edited by lego artist Mike Doyle, featuring 480 images of works by 70 artists. It's a movement! Do you suppose they have a manifesto? More at his blog.

Today's Bumper Sticker

A Clean House is a Sign of a Wasted Life

A Salad Recipe from 1660

Take the buds of all good sallets herbs, capers, dates, raisins, almonds, currans, figs, orangado. Then first of all lay it in a large dish, the herbs being finely picked and washed, swing them in a clean napkin; then lay the other materials round the dish, and amongst the herbs some of all the foresaid fruits, some fine sugar, and on the top slic't lemon, and eggs scarce hard cut in halves, and laid round the side of the dish, and scrape sugar over all; or you may lay every fruit in partitions several. 

--Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660)

From Ask the Past. Love the low-tech salad spinner.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or Nineveh?

If you made a list of the most famous lists, surely the Seven Wonders of the World would be on it. It is not easy to explain to enduring fascination of these "wonders," since most of them vanished a long time ago. Maybe that we have to imagine them is part of their appeal. And how much do we really know about them? The Greeks and Romans who compiled various versions of this list liked to exaggerate how much they knew about their wonders; at least one man who was born after the Colossus of Rhodes had already been destroyed avowed that he had seen it with his own eyes. So there has always been some doubt about the facts behind these compendiums of marvels. The doubts cluster most densely around the most exotic wonder: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. What were they, who built them, where were they -- not all of the surviving lists say Babylon -- and what was wonderful about them?

When archaeologists began digging at Babylon in the late 1800s, they naturally hoped to find the remains of the gardens and answer some of these questions. Despite decades of searching, they never did. The Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar has been thoroughly explored as these things go, to no avail. Various structures were sometimes proposed as possible garden foundations, but these notions were not convincing even to those who advanced them. Not only that, but one thing that has been found in abundance from ancient Mesopotamia is inscriptions in which kings boasted about their achievements in two areas: war and building. Every halfway famous king left us a detailed record of all his major construction projects. Nobody has found any record of a great garden built at Babylon. The very long and grand boast of Nebuchadnezzar the Great has survived in two complete versions and many partial ones, none of which mention gardens. In one of my favorite unclassifiable books, The Seven Wonders of the World, John and Elizabeth Romer called the Hanging Gardens the most "insubstantial and elusive" of the wonders, for "there never was such a thing in Babylon."

This brings me to The Mystery of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon by British archaeologist Stephanie Dalley (2013). Reviewing all of the Babylonian evidence, Dalley also concludes that there can't ever have been famous hanging gardens in that city. Instead of suggesting that the gardens were a myth, she argues that they did exist, but not in Babylon. She thinks the garden that came to be remembered as a wonder was in Nineveh, built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib around 700 BCE. Her case is quite strong. After all, Sennacherib's boast about his achievements also survives, and it does include the building of a magnificent garden. Part of the Greek account of the Hanging Gardens is that they were built to resemble the mountains of the north, to soothe a homesick queen. No Babylonian king ever said such a thing, but the Assyrians absolutely did build gardens to resemble mountain scenery: "a garden like Mount Amanus," said Sennacherib of his work. One detail contained in some of the classical accounts in that the Hanging Gardens included trees growing on top of columned porticoes; look carefully in the top right corner of the damaged relief carving shown above, which Sennacherib put in another part of his palace, and you see a tree growing on top of a columned portico. Point for point, Sennacherib's garden matches up better with the classical "hanging gardens" than we have any right to expect. Dalley's vision of Sennacherib's garden is shown in the picture at the top of the post, as reconstructed by Terry Ball. As to why most of the classical authors put the gardens in Babylon, well, classical authors got Babylon and Assyria confused in lots of other ways, such as putting the Assyrian queen Semiramis in Babylon -- some accounts even make her the builder of the Hanging Gardens. I think the evidence against a "hanging garden" in Babylon is so strong that this is the only way to root the "wonder" in soil rather than myth.

There is much else in Dalley's book besides. The Seven Wonders were all technically marvelous as well as visually impressive, including the Hanging Gardens, and Dalley gives a long discussion of Assyrian technology. The planting of trees on top of great buildings was part of the marvel, but there was also the watering system. Several authorities mention "screws," and Diodorus Siculus in particular insisted that the mechanisms that drew up the water could not be seen. Dalley interpreted these accounts and some very obscure boasts of Sennacherib to mean that the water employed banks of "Archimedes" screws -- which, by the way, almost certainly existed many centuries before Archimedes. This part is not entirely convincing, but it is certainly possible, and as Dalley shows the Assyrian kings did devote a lot of attention to moving water around.

So, a fascinating book, and I am converted. I am sad to report, though, that reading it was a grim slog. Dalley belongs to what I call the Hiram Bingham school of archaeological writing, after the man who managed to write a dismal, boring book about discovering Machu Picchu. If you are really curious, my advice is to first read the Hanging Gardens chapter in the Romers' wonderful book, then skim through Dalley's text for the key parts of the argument. Trust me, you won't miss much.

The Future Rulers of the Earth

A big new study of distracted driving found that while most people cannot drive and talk on the phone at the same time, "a small group of supertaskers can." These people, about 2 percent of us, performed just as well at a range of tasks while "dual tasking" as they did while just focusing on one. They seem to have supernormal short-term memories. In our hyper-distracted world, they will end  up ruling all of us.

Mental Health Care in America

Today's fact about mental health care in our great republic:

New York City’s Rikers Island jail already has more mentally ill than all the state hospitals combined.

People who can't take care of themselves, can't take care of themselves.

Iran: Threats into Opportunities?

Hassan Rouhani, the President of Iran, has put his name to an Op-Ed in the Post that doesn't say very much. No surprise there -- I rarely read such statements from politicians, since they are carefully crafted to commit to nothing. But I found this part of the prologue interesting:

International politics is no longer a zero-sum game but a multi-dimensional arena where cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously. Gone is the age of blood feuds. World leaders are expected to lead in turning threats into opportunities.

I don't know if we can expect leaders to turn threats into opportunities, but it sure is fine when they can. I am not sure what to make of this "opening." I want it to be a good sign for relations between the US and Iran, but I have a bad feeling that we could talk all day with perfectly good will and still reach an impasse. Sometimes international tensions are just a lot of hot air -- like those between the US and Russia now, or between Japan and China over those useless islands -- but the US and Iran have a real conflict. They want the bomb, we don't want them to get it. But maybe they would be willing to accept nuclear monitoring and put off that ambition for a decade or so in order have sanctions lifted and get on with something like normal life. I could live with that.

Liberal Catholics are in Ecstasy

More from the Pope's interview:

The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is—these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today. God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. … We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes.

And:

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

And:

Human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth. Exegetes and theologians help the church to mature in her own judgment. Even the other sciences and their development help the church in its growth in understanding. There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning.

It would be hard to give a more forthright rejection of fundamentalism, or the kind of conservative Catholicism sometimes called "ultra."

Creepy Clown Terrorizes British Town

In the category of "too weird to be made up," I give you the tale of the Northampton Clown:

Someone known as the Northampton Clown, is dressing up as a clown and creeping out the residents of Northampton. . . . Some have reported that the creepy clown says, "Beep, beep," when it approaches people, a line from the Stephen King miniseries "IT" that features a child-killing clown. Others have said that he knocks on windows and then stands there, silently. Why the clown is there, and what he or she is doing, has baffled local residents. The clown is dressed in white face paint with drawn-on eyebrows, a curly red wig and ruffled collar, like Pennywise from "IT." Its first appearance was Friday, September 13.

The picture above, which has been circulating via Twitter, is said to be the clown.

Not weird enough for you? Try this:

A man in a superman outfit calling himself "Boris the Clown Catcher" has been patrolling the town, trying to apprehend the clown. . . So far, there have been no clown-related arrests.

Yongzheng Bowl

This porcelain bowl, bearing the mark of the Yongzheng Emperor (reigned 1722-1735), was just sold by Sotheby's for $941,000. Below, the emperor himself.

A Pope with the Christian Spirit

The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.

-- Pope Francis

I love to hear the Pope speaking about mercy instead of doctrine. To me, the core of Christianity is the forgiveness of sin: the insistence that everyone is a sinner, but God nonetheless extends his mercy to all who seek it.

When I contemplate what might be lost in a secular world, I always come back to the religious quality of mercy. I sense in my fellow humans a disturbing vindictiveness and love of punishment, a horror at anyone "getting away with" crime, that I think needs to be tempered with mercy. If it does not come from religion, where will it come from?

I remember a story many years ago about two children of an immigrant woman found spending their days alone in a storage locker while their mother worked. This provoked one of those proverbial "storms of indignation." Condemnation was in the air; all sorts of dire punishments were suggested for the mother. It was left to a spokeswoman from the Maryland Council of Ministers to say that they were trying to contact the woman to find out what sort of help she might need.

House Republicans Go to War Against Obamacare

Republicans in the House of Representatives have launched what looks like a suicide mission against the Affordable Care Act, vowing that they will allow the government to shut down on September 30 and the country to default on its debts in mid October unless Obama agrees on repeal.

Various insiders insist that this is all kabuki, and that the House leadership is just posturing for the faithful back home. I hope so. Obama can read polls, and they say most Americans would blame the Republicans for a shutdown or a default, so he is hardly likely to surrender his "signature accomplishment" in the face of a shutdown threat. He knows that Democrats gained several House seats after the last shutdown. So do the House leaders, for that matter, which is why many pundits think they don't really mean what they say.

Which brings us to the question of why so many hard-core conservatives are desperate for a health care showdown. E.J. Dionne:

But it’s also important to understand why the Republican right is so fixated on killing or delaying Obama­care before it goes into effect. Its central worry is not that the program will fail but that it will succeed. In an interview on Fox News this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) a leader of the stop-Obamacare forces, gave the game away. After ritualistically declaring that “Obamacare isn’t working,” he said this: “If we’re going to repeal it, we’ve got to do so now or it will remain with us forever.” Why? Because once the administration gets the health insurance “exchanges in place . . . the subsidies in place,” people will get “hooked on Obamacare so that it can never be unwound.” In other words, Obamacare, like Medicare and Social Security, could work well enough and improve the lives of enough people that voters will get “hooked” on it. 

The Republicans' strategy over the past 30 years has been to turn Americans against government (and taxation to fund it) by arguing that government doesn't work. So any big, public thing the government does that works is a threat to their strategy. It makes perfect sense from their point of view. But why the rest of us would put up with it is something of a mystery.

Aragonese Castle, Ischia

At the northern end of the Bay of Naples is the lovely island of Ischia, one of Italy's many seaside playgrounds. Off the coast of Ischia is an even smaller island, -- the insula minor, it was called, in contrast to the insula major -- a steep rock that has proved to be a perfect spot for fortifications intended to control traffic into the bay.

The first known fortifications were built by the tyrant Hiero I of Syracuse in 474 BCE. Hiero was a flamboyant leader best known for leading the Greeks of southern Italy to victory over the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae. "The King of Syracuse who delights in horses," Pindar called him in his first Olympian Ode.

The Romans captured the island in 326 BCE, lost it, and then took it again.

Most of what you see today was built by the Aragonese or the dynasty they installed in Naples, between the 14th and 17th centuries. The stone bridge to the mainland of Ischia was built in 1441 Alfonso V of Aragon.

Besides the castle itself, the islet was home in the Renaissance to a nunnery, a Basilian monastery -- Greek Catholics -- twelve churches, and numerous chapels.

The lovely website of a hotel within the castle says this about the little island:

When climbing up the Castle, in fact, you discover another world. The austere and closed aspect one beholds from the ground gives way to a citadel made up of sunny gardens and small tracks that always lead to incredible views. The Castle top smiles, animated by sea birds and big cats, olive groves and vineyards. In spite of its reputation, the Castle has today a heart that can be conquered by everybody who climbs its 113 metres by foot or by elevator. But only when you are on the top can you enter Ischia’s history. Cocooned in the mystery of time, you will find the 16th-century cathedrals and churches, frescoed catacombs, arches and vaults, walls of many centuries, Bourbon prisons. The silence of the Castle speaks with words in the shape of architecture, like a giant stone book to leaf through with no hurry.

Truly a beautiful place.